Tetris trademark issue, reprise

From:

Jonathan Underwood

Subject:

Tetris trademark issue, reprise

Date:

Tue, 1 May 2007 17:15:29 +0100

Dear Emacs developers,
Back in January the Fedora packager of Emacs asked if there was a
trademark infringement with tetris.el. This reply:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-01/msg00916.html
pointed out that trademarks don't usually cover file and function
names. But the issue is a bit more complex than that, because the game
itself in Emacs is called Tetris (at least, the menu item is called
that), and that may be a trademark issue. Plus the fact that tetris.el
could be regarded in someway as an executeable program might be an
issue. This has been thrashed through in a Bugzilla entry, where these
arguments are explained in much more detail, here
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=224627
I thought I should bring this up again here since the Red Hat legal
people seem quite concerned about it.
Best wishes,
Jonathan.